This cider was made in 2021 as part of the research carried out in writing 'A Vagrant's Pomona'. It is made entirely from fruit removed without the owner's permission and may or may not taste better for it.

Orchard 3
8-9-21 1720-1815 light cloud, muggy after the rain 18°C
This one is slightly anomalous and again stretches the
boundary between what’s scrumping and foraging, but
either way, a low-risk strike. This is intentional, it’s the
first of the series Tess is with me.
The ground is open access, but owned by one of
Cornwall’s big estates, it’s the first of two on their
land I have in mind, the other very different in both
character, intention, access and risk of apprehension.
This place is old mining country and the land was
devastated by that activity, now ceased some hundred
years, it was exploited for copper, tin and arsenic and
many of the spoil heaps lack vegetation even after that
length of time, the ground poisoned and looking like
I imagine the surface of Mars does. The apple trees
are planted on the edge of the mining area, shown
as a small field system on the old OS map and are
part of a mixed deciduous woodland roughly fifteen
years in the ground. The apple plantings form a fairly
considerable share of the species composition however,
the site being about four acres, there must be at least
fifty trees. What makes this place such a gift is that
the trees are all feral, not a single named variety label
or graft union to be seen. I was put on to this spot by
apple conspirator William Arnold and we’ve spent a
lot of time speculating on the reasons for planting and
origins of the trees, but my theory is this: the trees
were simply obtained from a tree nursery as crab-apple
(Malus sylvestris) whips for planting among the oak,
hawthorn, rowan, hazel, guelder rose, blackthorn,
ash and cherry. The relative lack of hairs on the leaf
undersides and petioles bears this out and the seed
stock may well have been sourced from a true M.
sylvestris, but given the extreme heterozygosity of the
apple and the intense labour required to pollinate by
hand thereby ensuring a known parentage, the fruit
from which the seeds were obtained to grow these
trees were likely pollinated by whatever other domestic
apple varieties happened to be in the vicinity of the
donor seed tree, hence the weird half-sibling collection
we find here. Given the heritability of some traits in
trees here, my guess would be that they came from
a nursery in a cider-producing area, my money is on
either Ashridge or Perrie Hale, but yet to be verified…
In any case, the sheer variety of fruit morphology and
character here is an absolute delight, from huge pale
bittersweets without a trace of acidity and a softness to
their tannins, to face puckering bright green sharps and
tiny deep-red grenades of tannin, russeted codlins and
gala offspring, sweet and aromatic. Really it’s a thing of
beauty and something I hope to emulate in the future.
But that raises an important point about this place – it’s
probably the nearest to an orchard in the traditional
sense of the word that I feel I have any agency or
legitimacy to harvest, but it’s still not mine and the
fruit still doesn’t belong to me; given this is open
access ground and the trees are clearly not cultivated,
this surely falls into the four F category of justifiable
forage? In any case, we’re careful not to rinse it, there’s
definitely enough to go around here, the abundance is a
joy and I have a feeling the resultant brew could be the
best of the bunch.
It’s brilliant that Tess wanted to get involved with
this. We’ve been scrumping together for twenty-four
years which, considering we’ve been married for
fifteen, places the activity of stealing other people’s
produce nicely at the core of our relationship. I trust
her inherently in all ways, but in the procurement of
illicit fruit absolutely I can rely on her to know how to
behave, what to look out for, what to get and when to
take to her toes. She was keen to get involved with this
crazy project, but this is the first Cornish scrumping
expedition we’ve jointly undertaken in the ten years
we’ve lived here (we annually hit orchards in the southeast
together and one particularly near Ticehurst gets
a solid pasting right in the plums. And the nuts. It’s a
lovely family outing) so wanted the first to be open and
low-risk: the others will be less so. It’s date night, the
kids are having dinner with Grandma, and it’s a perfect
evening to remember aspects of the journey we’ve been
on together and I fall in love all over again.